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Monday, 22 September 2014

Book: If Women Ran the World by Laurie Anne & Kevin Mac

I received a copy of If Women Ran the World from Story Cartel in exchange for my review.

Imagine if all the strong male figures throughout history had been female, that CEOs, sports stars and politicians were all women. And that man don't earn as much and are expected to be stay at home dads and to be easily walked over. That is the world that Bill and his two sons, Rob and Patrick, live in. Bill's wife divorced him for a younger man, Rob struggles to get his wife, Kristina, to notice him, and Patrick's love life is at a stand still. much like his job as an executive administrative assistant.

I can't say that I am totally sure how I feel about this book having read it, apart from thinking that the women in it (with the exception of April) were being absolute d***s. Basically If Women Ran the World takes the extreme stereotypes of men and women and inverts them to the extent where you don't get a man who is just interested in sex, or a woman that is emotionally invested in romance. Personally I think that the stereotypes were pushed a little bit too far, but I do recognise that without conforming to them the book would likely not have worked.

The stereotypes or traits that were assigned to the men in this book (so those often assigned to women in today's world - emotional, monogamous, cooking, cleaning etc.) worked well up until a point for me. All of the examples I just mentioned seemed relevant for the story to work, but there were some things that didn't work for me, such as the inversion that meant that men wore makeup and waxed, yet the women were still wearing dresses. Similarly, I wasn't so keen on the stereotype that women weren't all that career orientated (so in this book it was the men that weren't) but again that could just be me.

What I did like was the way that the authors adapted history without changing it (e.g. Cleopatrick of Egypt and Georgina Washington). But even better was the way that they used current events, such as the first man running for president (Harry Stinton, which replaced the real life Hilary Clinton) and even better was the reactin to The Black and Blue Millionaire a clear parody of E L James' Fifty Shades of Grey. I think I enjoyed that parody so much because the reactions were similar to my own when I read it (basically WTF is this???).